Ever since the GOP repeal-and-replace bill crashed, President Trump has confidently vowed that it’s only a matter of time until Democrats come groveling to him on their knees, begging for a deal that will save them from the collapse of the Affordable Care Act. In other words, Trump and Republicans needn’t take any steps to shore up the ACA’s exchanges, because they have all the leverage in the battle over its future — indeed, they have suggested, the ACA’s implosion is inevitable, ongoing, and already nearly complete.

But Trump just blinked. And in so doing, he inadvertently revealed that despite the bluster coming from him and Republicans, the politics of the battle over the ACA’s future tilt against them.

The Trump administration has now quietly announced that it will refrain from taking an important step that could have pushed the ACA’s individual markets toward collapse. Specifically, The Post and The New York Times report that the administration will keep on paying so-called “cost-sharing reductions” to insurance companies to cover their reimbursement of out-of-pocket costs for about 7 million lower-income customers.

If Trump stopped the payments on his own, it could cause insurers to flee the exchanges, which would melt them down, potentially leaving at least 10 million people without coverage. Trump could do this right now. Here’s how: House Republicans had sued the Obama administration to block the payments, and last year a federal judge ruled that they are invalid but kept them going, pending the former administration’s appeal. Trump could drop that appeal, which would cause the payments to stop. But the Trump administration has decided not to do this — at least for now — and to keep the payments going.

“The withdrawal of the cost-sharing reductions would essentially torch the exchanges in most states,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor and health policy expert at the University of Michigan, told me. “The Trump administration must think that it would be blamed for that. They’re admitting the politics are against them, at least with respect to something that has the potential to devastate the exchanges in a hot minute.”

Instead, by keeping up the payments, the administration has sent a signal to insurers that they should not exit the exchanges, at least for now. The administration does deserve credit for doing the right thing and averting the human toll that pushing the exchanges into collapse would have unleashed. But in pure political terms, this amounts to a concession of weakness.

–Greg Sargent
In the Battle Over Obamacare’s Future, Trump Just Blinked

Being poor in the United States generally involves having a portion of your limited funds slowly siphoned away through a multitude of surcharges and processing fees. It’s expensive to be without money; it means you’ve got to pay for every medical visit, pay to cash your checks, and frankly, pay to pay your overwhelming debts. It means that a good chunk of your wages will end up in the hands of the payday lender and the landlord. …

One of the most insidious fine regimes comes from the government itself in the form of fines in criminal court, where monetary penalties are frequently used as punishment for common misdemeanors and ordinance violations. Courts have been criticized for increasingly imposing fines indiscriminately, in ways that turn judges into debt collectors and jails into debtors’ prisons. The Department of Justice found that fines and fees in certain courts were exacted in such a way as to force “individuals to confront escalating debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no danger to the community; lose their jobs; and become trapped in cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape.” A new report from PolicyLink confirms that “Wide swaths of low-income communities’ resources are being stripped away due to their inability to overcome the daunting financial burdens placed on them by state and local governments.” There are countless stories of people being threatened with jail time for failing to pay fines for “offenses” like un-mowed lawns or cracked driveways.

Critics have targeted these fines because of the consequences they are having on poor communities. But it’s also important to note something further. The imposition of flat-rate fines and fees does not just have deleterious social consequences, but also fundamentally undermines the legitimacy of the criminal legal system. It cannot be justified — even in theory.

–Oren Nimni
Fines and Fees Are Inherently Unjust

Donald Trump has no strategy, no beliefs, and no principles.The president’s surprise decision to bomb Syria, after months of declaring far and wide that he would do no such thing, is causing some whiplash. What could have motivated this abrupt change? …

Trump has no political experience, no record of serious thought on foreign policy. He was for the Iraq invasion before he was against it. He has pledged to decimate ISIS while affecting an isolationist bent. This suggests that he is little more than a narcissistic con man. He lies more often than he tells the truth, and his lies typically serve one purpose: they are meant to make him look good. It is more likely that Trump did what his generals told him to do because he wants to be the sort of person who is respected by generals. It is likely he started caring about dead Syrians because the press suggested that only a monster wouldn’t. He did not bomb Syria because, in the battle between isolationism and interventionism being waged in his soul, the weight of his office tipped the field toward the latter. He’s a simple, vulgar person who makes decisions for simple, vulgar reasons.

To suggest otherwise gives Trump credit he hasn’t earned. There is no strategy. There is no grand plan. There is no moral, ethical, or philosophical calculation. There’s only Trump, and how he feels from one moment to the next.

–Sarah Jones
Donald Trump Has No Strategy, No Beliefs, and No Principles

In a narrow sense, none of Trump’s diversions will matter because ultimately the entire controversy will resolve on the same point: either the Trump campaign and Trump transition were up to no good, or they were not. If along the way it turns out Obama administration officials behaved improperly, it won’t have any bearing on that cardinal question.

The danger is that the administration will successfully poison the ultimate findings of FBI and congressional inquiries into election meddling. Those who treat this latest accusation as if it were grounded in good faith are abetting them in that goal.

White House aides with access to highly classified information, in concert with House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, have spent two weeks telling reporters a new story: that Obama officials spied on Trump aides during the transition by unmasking their names in transcripts of legal foreign intelligence intercepts, and inappropriately disseminating that information throughout the government, for exclusively political purposes. The person at the center of this conspiracy, they now say, was Obama national security adviser Susan Rice. “The more we find out about this, the more we learn there was something there,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer claimed on Tuesday, without elaboration. …

With conservative media fully bought in to the unmasking story, traditional outlets have felt obliged to treat Susan Rice’s actions as presumptively suspicious, when intelligence experts say it was likely either routine, or, more damningly for Trump, of urgent national security relevance.

In absence of everything we know to be true — about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, the ongoing counterintelligence investigation of Trump associates and Russian interference in the election, disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s post-hoc registration as a foreign agent — this would be an explosive allegation. In full context, it simply sounds like a national security adviser doing her job under extraordinary circumstances. …

We should all support a full accounting of what the Russian government did, what the Trump inner circle did, and how the US government responded. But Trump and his aides have been engaged in a well-documented campaign of deception since those fateful tweets on March 4. Placing the burden of proof on anyone other than them is an error we will all come to regret.

–Brian Beutler
Don’t Let Trump Get Away With His Latest Deception

The unemployment rate fell to 4.5 percent in March, its lowest level since May of 2007. The employment-to-population ratio also edged up to 60.1 percent, a new high for the recovery, but still more than 3.0 percentage points below its pre-recession level.

However, the good news on the household survey was accompanied by weak job growth in the establishment survey. The economy added just 98,000 jobs in March. Job growth was also revised downward by 38,000 for the prior two months, bringing the three month average to 178,000. There also has been some shortening of the average workweek. The index of aggregate weekly hours is unchanged from its January level.

The strongest areas of job growth were restaurants (21,700), building support services (16,800), and health care (13,500). Mining also added 11,000 jobs, as did manufacturing. Retail was a big job loser in the month, shedding 29,700 jobs. This sector is likely to continue to show weakness as several major chains have announced plans to close a large number of stores.

Wage growth appears to be slowing slightly. While the year-over-year increase in the average hourly wage was 2.7 percent, wages have grown at just 2.4 percent comparing the average of the last three months to the prior three months. This should give pause to those concerned about the labor market being too strong. The fall in the length of the workweek, coupled with modest wage growth, indicates there is much room for further strengthening.

–Dean Baker
Unemployment Falls to 4.5 Percent In Spite of Weak Job Growth

It isn’t only Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trump’s shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety — despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.

Consider Bernie Sanders, de facto leader of the #Resistance. “Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks,” he said at a rally in Boston on Friday, alongside fellow progressive senator Elizabeth Warren. …

Look, I get it. It’s difficult to accept that millions of your fellow citizens harbor what political scientists have identified as “racial resentment.” The reluctance to acknowledge that bigotry, and tolerance of bigotry, is still so widespread in society is understandable. From an electoral perspective too, why would senior members of the Democratic leadership want to alienate millions of voters by dismissing them as racist bigots?

Facts, however, as a rather more illustrious predecessor of President Trump once remarked, “are stubborn things.” Interestingly, on the very same day that Sanders offered his evidence-free defense of Trump voters in Boston, the latest data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) was released.

Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that “whether it’s good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trump’s appeal.” For example, he says, “in 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.” …

Look, if you still believe that Trump’s appeal was rooted in economic, and not racial, anxiety, ask yourself the following questions: Why did a majority of Americans earning less than $50,000 a year vote for Clinton, not Trump, according to the exit polls? Why, in the key Rust Belt swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, did most voters who cited the economy as “the most important issue facing the country” opt for Hillary over the Donald? And why didn’t black or Latino working class voters flock to Trump with the same fervor as white working class voters? Or does their economic insecurity not count? …

If Democrats are going to have any chance of winning back the White House in 2020, they have to understand why they lost in 2016, and that understanding has to be based on facts and figures, however inconvenient or awkward. The Sanders/Warren/Moore wing of the party is right to focus on fair trade and income equality; the calls for higher wages and better regulation are morally and economically correct. What they are not, however, is some sort of silver bullet to solve the issue of racism.

–Mehdi Hasan
Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues